Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power in 1940 and Helped to Save Britain

by Lynne Olson

448pp, Bloomsbury, £20

In his recent interview with Simon Schama, the prime minister reflected on the history of appeasement. With Iraq threatening to overshadow his premiership, Tony Blair highlighted the 1930s myopia towards dictatorships and reflected on the bizarre scenes of Neville Chamberlain appearing outside No 10 to disperse adulatory Downing Street crowds. For Blair, it was an early example of a public failing to face up to foreign threats. "If you look at the Sudan today, for example, you know there is something appalling going on, but can you get everyone to wake up about it?"

This is the theme of Lynne Olson's gripping new political history of the countdown to 1939. In contrast to Michael Foot's Guilty Men, Olson focuses on the "troublesome young men" who went against the "group think" of appeasement.

Of course, it is an intensely familiar story which has been told and retold with hallowed regularity since the 40s - most recently in Graham Stewart's dazzling work Burying Caesar: The Churchill-Chamberlain Rivalry. And Olson's account certainly covers all the appeasement landmarks: Geoffrey Dawson's craven editorship of the Times; the All Souls high table; Quintin Hogg and the 1938 Oxford by-election ("A vote for Hogg is a vote for Hitler"); Munich, Czechoslovakia and Poland. None the less, the history is recounted with such journalistic flair that it constantly feels fresh.

At the book's core lies a series of interconnected biographies depicting a cabal of well-heeled Tories. The heroes of the day are Harold Macmillan, Anthony Eden, Duff Cooper, Bob Boothby, "Bobbety" Cranbourne, Ronald Cartland, Harold Nicolson and Leo Amery. Each had their own unique plethora of ambitions, vices and political prejudices which only rarely came into harmony. But from 1937 onwards, they coalesced to oppose the policies of appeasement, depose Chamberlain as prime minister and install Winston Churchill in his place.

Rightly, Olson avoids the temptation of Whiggish inevitability and charts just how arduous and uncertain the process was. Chamberlain - whom she captures well - combined brittle vanity with a nasty streak of political vindictiveness. Those who were not his "friends" could count on a battery of retribution up to and including parliamentary deselection. "And I can tell you this, you utterly contemptible little shit," Chamberlain's chief whip, David Margesson, said to the young John Profumo after he voted against the government, "on every morning that you wake up for the rest of your life you will be ashamed of what you did last night."

For the vast majority of Tories, such threats, combined with an understandable disinclination to go to war, served to cow rebellion. However, the political and financial independence of the rebels meant they had the means to overcome intimidation. In Olson's account, Macmillan comes out well in his studious contempt for Chamberlain's serial misreadings of Hitler - going so far as to dress his Guy Fawkes as Chamberlain on bonfire night. Eden does less well. His principled resignation as foreign secretary over the appeasement of Mussolini was never followed up with an attack on Chamberlain's premiership. Instead, Eden retreated for lengthy games of tennis in the south of France as Hitler's troops goose-stepped into Austria. No 10 was his for the taking but, as Eden himself put it: "I lack the spunk."

Olson elegantly brings this political milieu to life. Inevitably, there is an American weakness for grand houses and grand names, with sepia accounts of the Cavendish and Salisbury dynasties. But if this history sometimes reads like an Anthony Trollope novel - with clubland plots, Savoy dinners and Cliveden weekends - then it is because that was how high politics worked. The extraordinary 30-year affair between Dorothy Macmillan and Boothby and its effects on Harold Macmillan (a close political ally of Boothby's) provides just one of Olson's intriguing side avenues into this network of gilded Tory rebels.

Yet what is also apparent is the centrality of Parliament. Despite holding a 250-seat majority, Chamberlain was steadily undone in the Commons. His petty, narcissistic mismanagement of the house at a time of national emergency, married to his rhetorical failings - Nicolson described him as resembling "the secretary of a firm of undertakers reading the minutes of the last meeting" - meant that he consistently botched the moment. As the government faltered, the rebels formed a workable alliance with Labour and the Liberals. The normally verbose Amery electrified the chamber when he impelled Arthur Greenwood to "Speak for England" and finally, in 1940, stole Cromwell's words to dismiss Chamberlain: "You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing! Depart, I say, let us have done with you! In the name of God, go!"

Behind the rebels loomed Churchill. Again, Olson underlines how his journey to Downing Street was far from secure. Many of the interwar Tories had strong reservations about his revanchist, racist, imperialist politics. The progressively minded Macmillan, in particular, had been appalled by Churchill's tenure as chancellor of the exchequer during the Depression. The Labour party was certainly no friend. Added to this was Churchill's own reputation for reckless, arrogant adventurism. But all eventually concurred that he was the man for the moment.

Churchill, meanwhile, was engaged in his own coy dance. Desperate to be back in government after the "wilderness years", he would criticise Chamberlain and then back away; offer succour to the rebels, but then accept a cabinet post. Perhaps there lurked the residual fear that he who wields the knife rarely wears the crown; but there was also a strange element of personal loyalty to Chamberlain that led him so far as to urge the PM to stay on at No 10.

Yet by May 1940, even Chamberlain eventually realised he could do nothing against his vanishing authority in the Commons and he finally ceded office. And what of the heroic "troublesome young men" who put Churchill into power? Just as Elizabeth I punished those loyal courtiers who had finished off Mary Queen of Scots, so the new PM was decidedly lukewarm in his payback to the rebels. Appeasers were promoted while Macmillan, Nicolson and Cranbourne were given low-rung posts as Churchill sought to bolster his standing in the Tory party and distance himself from the regicides. As Boothby plaintively noted: "Strangely, Churchill never really forgave the men who had put him in power."

But modern British politics was never so forgetful. When in 1956 Eden, having finally made it to the top of the greasy pole, thought he was confronted with another Hitler, in the form of President Nasser, he wasn't going to repeat the Chamberlain mistake. And now, if the Schama interview is anything to go by, it seems the meaning and "memory" of the 30s remain as alive as ever in the corridors of power.

· Tristram Hunt's Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City is published by Phoenix